The New Figuration Between Classicism and Superrealism From the cultural crisis that took place after World War I there emerged new aesthetic proposals in Europe, ranging from Dadaist rejection of rationality to the antithetical return to order, clarity and simplicity predominant in the Italian and German scenes. In Spain, this translated into a new wave of figuration with classical and surrealistic elements that appear in the work of artists like Salvador Dalí and Ángeles Santos.
In 1927, Franz Roh’s essay After Expressionism, Magic Realism: Problems of the Newest European Painting was published. For Roh, the new variants of European post-Expressionism had their origin in the group of artists associated with the Roman magazine Valori Plastici, founded in 1918. The artists Carlo Carrà (1881-1966), Giorgio De Chirico (18881978), Alberto Savinio (1891-1952), and Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964) contributed to it as spokesmen of the metaphysical movement, considered the antecedent of European Magic Realism. They expressed their interest in uniting the classical tradition of the Italian Primitives with the modern figurative language of Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) and Cubism. The premises of Valori Plastici make up some of the most notable elements of the movement Novecento italiano, which had already taken over when the Roman magazine closed in 1922. The publication of Magic Realism… was key in the configuration of a new Generation in Spain, made up of artists like Rosario de Velasco (1904-1991), Ángeles Santos (19112013), or Alfonso Ponce de León (1906-1936). Roh cited three Spanish artists in his book: Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Joan Miró (1893-1983), and Josep de Togores (18931970). The influence of these artists and the recovery of others like José Gutiérrez Solana (1886-1945), were a reference for anti-modern realism and crucial in the works of Maruja Mallo (1902-1995) or Ángeles Santos. After that date, to practice Magic Realism meant to set off toward a concrete artistic direction which already had its own referential canons. The forms of Modern Realism were those which had a longer life in the context of the renovation of Spanish art, and even endured when in other countries, like Italy and Germany, they had been overtaken.
Art developed between the two poles which Realism and Surrealism represented, with the common aim of recovering the representation of the human body. Modern Spanish Realism didn’t look so much for the metaphysical quality of things, in the Italian style, so much as the irrational side that every excess of reality has. For that reason, many practitioners of Modern Realism had no difficulty in nor did they find contradiction in their encounter with the surreal. This oscillation between Magic Realism, Metaphysical Painting, Surrealism, and even Hyperrealism was not something strange in the Spanish artistic reality; on the contrary, stylistic nomadism was the characteristic of those years. The case of Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) was very special. Very informed of what was being done in the rest of Europe through the magazine Valori Plastici and L’esprit nouveau, he created subterranean channels between the new Classicism, Modern Realism, and the Surreal which led to his pinnacle at the eclecticism of “Arte Nuevo”. These paths would be the same ones along which Ángeles Santos would travel years later. To speak of Ángeles Santos it is necessary to mention the importance of the sojourn in Valladolid during the 1920s of the painter Cristobal Hall (1897-1949), who was a great influence on the Modern Realism Santos practiced. She was a painter who in her time was quickly admitted into the circles of the avant-garde, defended especially by Gómez de la Serna and Giménez Caballero.